Yes. Globally the vast majority of airlines use either Amadeus, Apollo, or SABRE for everything from reservations to crew scheduling. United wrote Apollo, American wrote SABRE back in 1960. So yeah, other airlines have far better tech people and have for decades. While Southwest now pushes ticketing data to those three, as of a few years ago they were using other software for scheduling and even doing things by hand (like tracking bags) that other airlines had already automated. If anecdotes from crew are accurate the other problem is that Southwest did nothing to optimize their disaster recovery plan (if there even is one). Manual data entry can scale more than it is at Southwest, but they're still stuck in the teensy airline state of mind where even wildly inefficient workflows can scale.
As for ADS-B, that's hopelessly naive. ADS-B tracks planes, not people. The problem Southwest is having is trying to figure out who is legal to work and where they are. Tracking equipment is so trivial in comparison it's largely a secondary concern.
The other carriers do also have a tipping point of no return, where their software can't handle the situation. But, they were more aggressive about canceling flights in careful waves before they got to that point.
Some of the observations here are correct, but there's a big missing piece. Southwest went too far in with an overoptimistic schedule. They won't say that because then there's no easy scapegoat, it's just a pure management thing.
There is always a trade-off between robustness and efficiency. By leaving less slack the SWA schedule is more efficient, but also more tightly strung. When failures exceeded the slack capacity the whole schedule fell apart.
The problem of recovery is also extensively studied. But it seems like SW did not put enough effort into having fault tolerant restart.
Right. I'm saying though, it's not just the initial state of less slack in their system due to hub and spoke versus point to point. It's also that other airlines were more realistic about backing off flights earlier and more aggressively as a reaction to the developing info on the storm.
It paints a picture of an organisation which didn't see the need to accurately assess risk on a real time basis. If I was the COO I would want rolling projections for the week based on good/bad/ugly weather. But it seems SW was too busy cutting costs and building capacity as cheaply as possible to think about that.
